A mobile electronic device often travels along with its user from place to place. Each day, the user encounters dozens or even hundreds of other electronic devices having the potential to communicate with the mobile electronic device. The user meets for instance other people carrying their own mobile electronic devices, visits places equipped with consumer or office electronics, or passes by a store that provides electronic services or marketing.
There exist powerful user interface (UI) concepts which can be used in communications between different electronic devices, such as cut-and-paste, copy-and-paste and drag-and-drop concepts. These concepts provide very intuitive possibilities of interconnecting different applications even across different electronic devices.
For instance, it is a simple task to drag-and-drop a file from the disk of one computer to the disk of another computer, provided that the computers are first connected to each other.
Before a user can make his or her mobile electronic device interact with an encountered electronic device, an ad-hoc connection has thus to be established first.
Most prior art approaches require the user to create an ad-hoc connection in a way that is specific to the connection technology. The creation of the ad-hoc connection may also be separated completely from the task for which the connection is desired.
For example, the user of a laptop computer may start a card manager application for activating a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) card and select the correct connection profile and/or access point. When making an ad-hoc connection, the user may even have to create a new connection profile. Finding the necessary parameters for the connection profile is a challenge of its own.
Unless the user encounters the same electronic device almost every day, it is therefore unlikely that the user bothers or is in a position to connect his or her mobile electronic device to some encountered device.
Also if the possibility of establishing a connection is integrated into an application, the user of known devices has to follow a complex menu structure until the right menu item is found. In general, it is a target to allow a desired item to be reached with as few clicks as possible, but due to the large amount of functions, there are usually nevertheless several clicks needed to reach a desired item.
In a typical situation in which content is to be shared or exchanged between the electronic devices of two users, somebody takes a picture with a DSC or a camera enabled mobile phone and desires to share the picture with another person close by. To send the item over a short-range technology, like Bluetooth™, the person has to select the right menu item in the device, address the other device, typically by first searching or inquiring the device, select the device and then transmit the picture file to the other device. This requires a couple of steps, and for many technically inexperienced end users, this will be a burden in actually using an available function.